White House briefings grow rare under Trump

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did appear at the podium Wednesday — her first briefing in nine days — and the top issue on the docket was where she’d been lately. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In July, President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, floated a get-together with Iran’s leaders to discuss a new nuclear deal, bragged about strong economic growth and threatened to shut down the federal government.

In that time, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held just three briefings for reporters to ask questions about the activity of a hectic administration.

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As the calendar turned to August, Sanders did appear at the podium Wednesday — her first briefing in nine days — and the top issue on the docket was where she’d been lately.

“First, a quick note on behalf of the press corps: Last month, there were only three briefings with you, totaling under an hour,” said AP reporter Zeke Miller, a White House Correspondents’ Association board member, adding that reporters would appreciate having more. “There are a lot of issues we’d like to cover.”

Frustration over the issue had been building in the press corps for some time. In a meeting with Sanders last Thursday, WHCA president Olivier Knox laid out his concerns about the eroding access.

“The relative scarcity and brevity of briefings is an issue that I raised with Sarah Sanders in our most recent meeting,” Knox said. “Obviously, the White House press corps values formal opportunities in which we can ask questions of senior officials. I conveyed that my members were hopeful that we’d get back to a more normal schedule.”

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July’s three briefings tied a low for any month during the Trump presidency. Sanders took questions for a combined 56 minutes during them, or about 19 minutes each. Under previous administrations, briefings could stretch over an hour.

That represented a downslope from June, when the White House held five press briefings, afternine in May, eight in April, nine in March, nine in February and 11 in January. The only other month in which the administration held as few as three briefings was August 2017, when Trump spent much of his time away from the White House at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. While there, Trump spoke frequently and at length with reporters. Taking that into account,last month might have been the toughest yet for reporters on the beat seeking to publicly question the administrationon a range of subjects.

On Wednesday, Sanders took questions for 21 minutes. After starting the briefing a half-hour late, she hopped between reporters, saying, “We’re tight on time because the president is going to be speaking” — a strategy she frequently employs to move briefings along.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump is slated to travel to Pennsylvania Thursday for a rally, and the White House usually does not hold televised briefings when he travels. He heads to his golf club at the end of the week, so it’s not clear whether Wednesday’s briefing will portend many more to follow.

According to numbers compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political science professor emeritus who tracks press interactions with the president as the director of the White House Transition Project, previous administrations briefed much more often and at much greater length than Sanders has the last two months. In June and July of 2002, George W. Bush’s second year in office, press secretary Ari Fleischer held seven and nine White House press briefings, respectively (plus one more off-camera gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One).

Fleischer told POLITICO that those numbers sounded lower than usual for him, suggesting that Bush was likely traveling during those months. Press secretaries tend not to brief if the president is on the road or participating in a major event.

“Sarah’s numbers, if the president is in the White House and there’s no major event and she’s not briefing, then the numbers are light and it’s probably a break with tradition,” Fleischer said.

In June 2010, Barack Obama’s second year in office, press secretary Robert Gibbs briefed nine times in the White House and gaggled with reporters twice on Air Force One, according to Kumar’s numbers. In July 2010, Gibbs briefed 11 times in the White House, plus two Air Force one gaggles.

Kumar noted that under previous administrations, there usually wasn’t the same amount of month-to-month fluctuation in briefing opportunities as there has been under Trump.

Kumar said the decline in briefings reflects Trump’s style.

“The press secretary is a reflection of the president,” Kumar said. “If you look at both President Obama and President Bush, both of them trusted their press secretaries and others to speak for them. I think that President Trump likes to speak for himself.”

Knox, the chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, said that while he could not get into details of his meeting with Sanders, “I represented that our membership is concerned.”

“She heard what we had to say,” Knox said.

He added that he’s received “expressions of concern from colleagues via email, phone and in person.”

Knox noted that it is not as though Trump is inaccessible. The president will often take a question or two while walking out to Marine One, in the Oval Office before or after a photo-op, or before a cabinet meeting. According to numbers kept by Kumar, from his first day in office through July 20 of this year, Trump has engaged in 227 short question-and-answer sessions with reporters, compared to 67 in that same time-span for Obama — who tended to prefer longer-form interviews — and 205 for Bush.

But those situations allow Trump to take just a few questions at a time and easily control which ones he does and doesn’t want to answer. When CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins asked a series of questions in the Oval Office last week that Trump apparently did not like, he simply ignored them, and the White House barred Collins from covering an event later in the day.

The cut in briefing time, both Kumar and Knox say, prevents reporters from getting past the top one or two questions of the day — especially important at a time with so much news.

“For example, we’re basically a year out from the president announcing his Afghanistan strategy, it would be worthwhile to ask Sarah or [national security adviser] John Bolton or some other senior official in that setting whether they think it’s working,” Knox said. He then ticked through a host of other issues, including North Korea, healthcare, regulatory rollback, the prospect of another Trump-Putin summit and the Mueller probe.

“There’s a lot to ask,” he said.

While many have questioned the usefulness of the briefing under Trump — pointing out that Sanders is rarely forthcoming and often gives out misleading or incorrect information — Kumar said it’s a valuable forum for reporters to get the White House on the record. In the past, White Houses have used the briefing to help shape coverage, though she said Trump seems to prefer doing that via other means, most notably his Twitter feed.